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Saturday, January 16, 2016

'Epic Fail' from BurkhardS - Jagdtiger

Epic fail gave me some headaches at
first. I could only count out a Leman Brother Bank, since we are not
allowed terrain in this Challenge. Then I thought about the Death Star,
but my better half insisted we had no space for a PS 2014 from Ikea.

So
it was back to the drawing board. But then I had an idea... World War
II produced so my tanks, there must have been one that was an epic fail,
at least in my eyes.

In my humble opinion, this had always been the wrong type of tank for the time. It was very heavy and thus suffered from the same problems as its turreted brothers, the Königtiger. As such it took huge resources to build, was a nightmare to transport by train, had problems with terrain due to its high ground pressure and guzzled so much fuel, that the Germans did not have at that time. Even worse yet, most of them seem to have been used on the western front, were its 122mm gun was the overkill for any opponent, while on the eastern front where it might have been useful vs. the JS-2s and big ISUs there were hardly any.

But what really underlined its status as an epic fail was an incident that took place when a Jagdtiger from the 512. Panzerjägerabteilung (the unit depicted above) attack an allied column near Holzwickede in Germany, which incidentally was less then 10 kilometer from where I used to live until a few years ago. This Jagdtiger fired at a Sherman. By that time Germany had no smokeless ammo anymore and after the first shot, at maximum range, the whole tank was shrouded in smoke. Seeing this, the infantry accompanying the tank though that big beast had been taken out and ran. Without any support the Jagdtiger was forced to retreat as well. So in essence, the big tank, which should have instilled calm in its troops and could have taken out the enemy without them ever having a chance to fire back, had broken the units morale with a single shot. As such this was my epic fail.

Not much to say about the model here. It is a 1:48th scale Tamiya early model Jagdtiger straight out of the box.

Looking at period photos I found that most of them seem to have been painted in a simply soft edged three tone camo. So I went with a Dunkelgelb base with, red primer and green camo airbrushed on. Some chipped paint effects and washes & filters to enhance the worn look as well as the soft edged effect of the camo. Also added some rain marks to the superstructure to round off the slightly for look. (I do not like my tanks if they look like they have not been cared for for months.) Unfortunately I ran out of time, otherwise it would have received a slight coat of dust with the airbrush, but that will be easy enough to add in the future. While painting it, I remembered, why I usually hate to paint Königstiger or Jagdtiger. All those tow chains and spare tracks are a pain in the behind to paint.

Great idea Burkhadt! I recall the old Avaln Hill Panzer Leader game , which had a guide listing all the units' strengths and weaknesses. It listed the Jagdtigers enemies as small mammals that ate the eggs!Cheers Peter